Posing with one of my paintings circa 2013
“Ka? What are you doing here?” I questioned my new brother in law as he pulled up to my spot on the cement walkway on his beat up silver motorbike.
Ka seemed flustered by this and looked down shyly. He seemed to be searching for the words in English. Finally he tapped the seat of the motorbike. “I can take you. Eliza. Home.”
It was a very hot day in Phuket’s dry season and I had been walking a long way in the beating sun with my newborn baby in a pouch on my belly. “Okay.” I said as I hopped on the motorbike, grateful for the ride.
This was turning out to be a lousy birthday for me. One year before this I had been in Las Vegas at my parent’s house and my mother had baked me a key lime pie for the occasion, knowing, as she does, that I won’t eat cake. That evening I had blown out the candles on my birthday “cake” on video Skype to my boyfriend Oh in Phuket. I had been willing to view my last minute fling with my bartender in Thailand as nothing more than a closing good memory on the place, but Oh had other ideas. He had persisted in drawing me back to Phuket, where I became pregnant with my daughter on the first month we tried. I married Oh shortly thereafter. I was thus celebrating my first birthday married with a newborn baby in a house in Thailand.
I had talked to my new husband Oh briefly about it the night before.
“My birthday tomorrow.” I had told him. I didn’t expect my husband to remember it. “I thinking maybe can have some friends come. Maybe drinking I put milk for Eliza in bottle. I okay easy easy.”
I really was that simple. Nai Yang or any beach was not a good idea as I was still healing from my C section scar and I doubted it would be interesting yet to our newborn anyways. I am sure that like any red blooded woman in the world I hoped that my new husband Oh swept me off my feet with some romantic gesture of flowers and massages. We could have had a great birthday with just wine and movies and the three of us at home. I wasn’t quite healed enough to be too intimate again, but we were getting close.
Instead my new husband, who had been off work for several weeks around the time of the birth of our child, had left in the early morning hours of my birthday March 18. Oh had told me that he was going to a friend’s house to pick up some tattoo ink. He had taken the 400 baht or so I had on the nightstand with him when he had left. Then my husband’s phone went straight to voicemail, or callback services.
I had been left on my birthday with 33 baht, or $1, in spare change. My husband’s phone was shut off and I had no idea where he was. There was no motorbike and I had a newborn baby. There was little food.
I set out at about 10 AM with my 5 week old infant in the pouch on my front to the nearest local shop some 500 meters away. Sometimes Oh had gone there to drink with friends and since his phone was turned off I was hoping to catch him there. That shop was closed.
I walked to another shop a little over one kilometer away on a side road. I tried to call Oh but his phone was still turned off. I scrolled through my contacts list. Finally I decided to call Mar, my mother in law, to ask if she had seen my husband. She did not seem to understand much of the conversation as her English was nonexistent and my Thai was poor. Based on her confused tone, however, I was sure that Oh had not gone to his mother’s house.
I had to assume that my brother in law Ka had heard about the conversation with his mother and decided to check on me and Eliza. It was odd that he had found me on this back road as it wasn’t headed directly on the path to our rental house. Had my brother in law been looking for me?
I unlocked the door to the house in Pakrom Cheep and put my sleeping newborn on the couch. The three bedroom two bath rental was 7000 baht per month, or about $250. It was off the beaten path but had every amenity a white person might want, from a well manicured garden to a bathtub. I had been hoping to bring my older daughter there but my ex Joe had been very evasive about it.
Oh had not returned since my walk. I scrolled through my phone and called my husband again as the message went straight to voicemail. “You know where Kuhn Oh?” I asked Ka.
“No. I don’t know. I can stay with you until he come back.” Ka said. It was already past noon Oh had been gone more than five hours with no news. I was becoming angry and worried.
“It’s my birthday.” I said to my brother in law exasperated. “I thinking Kuhn Oh say Happy Birthday or drinking a little bit or something.”
Ka’s eyes grew wide and he smiled. “Gen! You’re birthday same me!” I had already settled on the couch and had opened my laptop to my Facebook page.
“Can show you?” He questioned as he typed something into the search box. It opened to a facebook page for Ka Umami. “Nee! Here!” My brother in law’s facebook page listed his birthday as March 19, 1980. For whatever reason he had put it one year later than I would eventually find out it was. Perhaps he thought having a birth year in the 1980’s made him sound 10 years younger than having a birth year in the 1970’s did.
“That’s really cool, Ka. So your birthday is one day and one year from mine! Happy early birthday!” My new brother in law was another Pisces. I had noticed an emerging hotheaded jealousy in my husband Oh when I talked about my ex, but it brought something back to me. “You know my ex Kuhn Joe? Jasmine’s father?” I questioned Ka.
“Kuhn Joe? Yes. I know.”
I continued. “He have brother with same birthday as me on March 18! Now he was older than me, not younger same you. You should ask Mar when you born.” My newborn infant began crying softly. “Like Eliza she born morning time in Thailand. So it was the night before in the USA on February 8. If you were born morning time, your birthday March 18 same me in America.” The ramifications of what I had just said for the cross in Thailand on my evening birth time in Toledo, Ohio, USA, had not yet occured to me.
Ka seemed to be thinking about this. “A few minutes. I come back.” He said, as he drove off on his motorbike. I thought he might have had some idea where his brother Oh was. I tried to call my new husband again and it went straight to voicemail for the dozenth time. I clicked off Ka Umami’s facebook page, after sending him a friend request of course, and sent some top secret message to a few female friends in America. I needed somewhere to vent about my husband abandoning me on my birthday. One friend was still awake and messaged me for a very long time about it as I breastfed my newborn baby. There was a knock on the door.
“Hello?” I heard Ka questioning as I let him in. He had brought food: some sticky rice in a bamboo container along with some fish curry wrapped in banana leaves of the type that my mother in law sold at the market. He also had two 12 ounce cans of Chang beer.
“Happy birthday me you. I sorry I don’t have money too much for buy beer.” Ka apologized.
“No this is perfect.” I told him. “I feed Eliza from my breast. I can’t drink too much or baby drunk too.”
“Baby not drunk!” Ka laughed. “Okay okay! Cheers. To your birthday same me.”
“No it’s not. Tomorrow you’ll be turning 33. Today I am 34.”
Ka shook his head as he searched for words. “No. I 33 same you.”
“No tomorrow.” I messaged back with my friend and tried to call Oh again. It still went straight to voicemail.
The afternoon hours whittled away with Ka in the background. I suppose that should have been awkward for me, but it really wasn’t. He picked some papayas off of our trees in the back, cut a ripe orange one open for me to eat and then made som tam. He kept on serving me food with a little joke about being a five star chef waiting on a rich white person at Coconut Island Resort.
I began pondering the March 18 birthdays. Joe’s brother had technically never been my brother in law and Ka wasn’t technically born on March 18, but they still shared some similarities. In both cases they seemed almost painfully shy and soft spoken to me. Both of them were never married no children types who never even seemed to have a girl anywhere in their vicinity. Both Joe and Oh in their respective cases had insisted that this was because their brother was closet gay.
Ka was often in the background somewhere cutting rubber trees or harvesting vegetables when we visited my mother in law. He also came to every gathering we hosted at the house and helped my husband out with projects such as adding pipe to the well during the dry season. I saw my brother in law once or twice per week yet I had never really spoken to him. The most extended one on one conversations I had had by far with Ka were these ones, on this day. I really never thought the guy spoke any English and my Thai language was basically nonexistent.
Despite that my brother in law always insisted “Take my picture! Post facebook!” I thought he was handsome enough and obliged. I was ever eager to show off my happy new Thai family life to folks back home. Oh meanwhile was less approving of my facebook time, called the site “Fakebook” and sometimes didn’t want his picture taken. This created an odd disparity that I only noticed in retrospect: I probably have more pictures of my brother in law Ka from that era than I do of my husband Oh.
Oh finally called me as the late afternoon sun was settling down. “I make tattoo for my friend I can’t charge phone battery! I come back soon!” My husband finally arrived as nightfall was setting in.
“It’s my birthday I wanted to go out!” I yelled at him when he came back. Ka started chiming in in Thai language about this too.
“I tell you before Gen. NOBODY CARES ABOUT THE BIRTHDAY IN THAILAND!” My new husband was even more hotheaded than normal this time. He angrily shoved Ka out the door, who muttered some things and sped off on his motorbike. I had been to many birthday parties for Thai people during my time in the Land of Smiles, so this story sounded like bullshit to me. Nonetheless something had triggered Oh about it big time.
My husband told me he knew of a friend who was having a gathering nearby. He needed me to take money out of the ATM to buy beer and other things for it. “If you’ve been making a tattoo all day shouldn’t they have been giving you money?” I questioned.
“I have to buy many things!” Oh shouted angrily back. Some women at the party cooed over my newborn baby. I wrote it off at the time as my husband trying to salvage the day for me, but it wasn’t one of my better birthdays. I didn’t post on Facebook about it or try to show off my happy family life story that day.
I’d finally gotten what I wanted and was married. The hopeless romantic in me had wanted to spend my first birthday as such with my husband.
It’s ironic to realize in retrospect that I did…
Ka better man than Oh. Glad you figured that out eventually.
Mine is March 18 also! Great story Amy.